Amazon's One Medical Acquisition Will Further Erode Our Privacy

By Roger McNamee and Johnny Ryan, Time

Patient privacy has been inviolable since the time of Hippocrates, in 400 BC. That may be about to end. Last week Amazon announced it is going to acquire One Medical, a health care provider with over 700,000 patients.

Big Tech has flirted with health care for years. Amazon’s direct entry into primary health care is a turning point. It will increase the perils of surveillance capitalism, with implications for everyone.

Amazon knows our guilty pleasures, what we buy, what pills we buy, and what we watch and read and listen to. Its devices listen in our homes, and peep out of our (Amazon Ring) door bells. Amazon’s “Kuiper” satellites will soon connect our Internet.

Recent scandals revealed that Amazon uses the data collected for supposedly innocent reasons in ways that betray our trust. Amazon staff say there are no limits on how Amazon uses this data internally. According to Amazon’s former head of information security: “We have no idea where our fucking data is.”